I’m excited to be going to Fortaleza at the end of this month to present and organize Agile Brazil 2011. Last year in Porto Alegre I decided to focus on the organization aspects of the conference, but this year I decided to present again. Even though I’ve been participating in conferences around the world, my last talk in Brazil was in 2008 and I really miss being around the Brazilian community and sharing experiences with everyone. That’s why I’m happy to be presenting in (mostly) Portuguese again :-)

Managing your technical debt – June 29th

In this 50 minutes talk, I will cover a few practices and ideas I’ve used and seen used in projects to manage technical debt responsibly. Some of the topics I will cover are:

What is technical debt and what are the consequences of incurring it

Ideas on how to identify “hot spots”

How to prioritize and plan the payment of your debt

Tracking and visibility

How to avoid incurring debt

Communicating the importance of paying technical debt to non-technical managers and stakeholders

Slicing and dicing your user stories – July 1st

Co-presenting with Jenny, in this 50 minutes talk we will discuss the benefits of working with small user stories, and present different ways to split requirements into user stories. The session will cover topics related to:

What makes good user stories

How to break down features into smaller chunks without losing track of the overall goal

Different ways to split stories into vertical slices

Helping stakeholders to track and understand how the feature will be delivered piece by piece

Planning the delivery to increase feedback

Refactoring Katas – July 1st

In this 10 minutes Lightning Talk, I’ll share an idea I’ve been using to practice refactoring. Using a different Kata format, I will explain the mechanics and quickly demonstrate it in practice.

If you haven’t registered yet, you can still register online. And if you are around Rio and São Paulo the following week, I will be giving ThoughtWorks’ AWS Training, which you can register here. I’m looking forward to seeing you in Fortaleza!

With my visit to Brazil to attend Agile Brazil 2011, ThoughtWorks is organizing two classes of our AWS (Amazon Web Services) training in Brazil. If you are near Rio de Janeiro on July 6th or near São Paulo on July 7th, don’t miss the chance to participate!

ThoughtWorks AWS Training is a one-day, hands-on training course for developers, systems administrators and all technologists who want to embark on a technical deep-dive of Amazon’s powerful AWS tools. Developed in partnership with Amazon, the class will lead you through the AWS infrastructure services, and show you how to architect and deploy your applications “in the cloud”.

As I’ve already mentioned here, the Agile Brazil 2010 conference is accepting session proposals to be part of our program. Already with more than 90 sessions proposed, the program committee decided to postpone the deadline for session submissions until next Sunday (7th March 2010) due to requests and to allow more time for the community to interact and help us build the program. Some new functionality was also released:

Users are now able to add comments to the sessions. We want the community to provide feedback to help our authors to improve their sessions prior to the deadline;

You can now vote and help us choose the conference logo. We received many proposals, and narrowed it down to 3, and we’re now asking the community to vote on the winner.

In order to participate voting or adding comments, you don’t have to fill out the full author profile, so visit our website (if you haven’t created your account yet) and participate!

I’m one of the organizers of the program committee for Agile Brazil 2010, and we’re very happy to announce that ThoughtWorks has agreed to sponsor the visit of Martin Fowler, our Chief Scientist, as one of our keynote speakers. Since this is Martin’s first visit to Brazil, I decided to ask him some questions that I thought would be of interest to the participants, and he has kindly agreed to participate in this mini-interview:

Q: What have been keeping you busy lately?

Martin Fowler: Overwhelmingly it’s my upcoming book on DSLs. I found writing books to be hard work, and it’s actually getting harder. By June I expect all of the content will be cast so my mind will be able to get away from it – which I’m very much looking forward to.

Q: What are your expectations about Agile Brazil 2010?

MF: I try not to have expectations about things, that way my mind can be open to the reality when I see it. I’ve been doing conferences frequently for two decades now, so it’s hard to get excited about them. I am excited about coming to Brazil. It will be my first time in South America and both I and my wife have long wanted to come down.

Q: What are you going to talk about in your keynote?

MF: I have no idea. I often don’t decide on my keynote until very close to speaking – often doing extemporaneous talks <http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ExtemporarySpeaking.html>. Recently I’ve been doing keynote talks consisting of three or so talklets, some with slides, some without. But exactly how I’ll do it is something I may only decide the night before.

Q: How do you see the Brazilian software community influencing the future of Agile?

MF: It’s hard to say, as I’m not that familiar with the Brazilian software world. I’ve been very impressed by the Brazilian ThoughtWorkers I’ve met over the years, so I know there’s great potential here. I’m generally keen to see more varied cultures contribute to the software world, I think it’s an important part of us growing as a profession.

Agile Brazil 2010 is going to be an incredible conference, and we’re inviting speakers to submit session proposals (the deadline is approaching: 28/Feb!). Don’t miss the chance to see and talk to Martin Fowler, as he’s one of the few speakers I know of that can put together a first-class keynote on the night before :-)

Don’t forget to follow @agilebrazil on Twitter for conference news, and hope to see you there!

I’m helping to organise the first nation-wide Agile conference in Brazil, that will take place in Porto Alegre next 22-25th June. Agile Brazil 2010 is a joint effort to bring together all the Agile communities around Brazil (industry and academy), and the conference goal is to promote communication and collaboration among its attendees aiming to disseminate the Agile culture in the whole country. Some of the confirmed international guest speakers are ThoughtWorks’ Chief Scientist Martin Fowler, Philippe Kruchten, and David Hussman.

After working the past month on building the submission system, I’m happy to announce that we’re inviting you to join as a speaker of this great event too! Tell Brazil about your experiences, present your research and share your products and learnings! You can find the deadlines and the submission guidelines at: